Building the Team: Tasks, People, and Relationships

The first rule of teamwork at SEI, the money management firm headquartered in Oaks, Pennsylvania, is that there are remarkably few rules. Teams have anywhere from 2 to 30 members and every team is structured differently. Most employees belong to one “base team” as well as three or four ad hoc teams. These ad hoc teams give SEI a sense of perpetual motion. Work is distributed among roughly 140 self-managing teams. Some are permanent, designed to serve big customers or important markets. But many are temporary: People come together to solve a problem and disband when their work is done. The result is a workplace that is always on the move. “We call it fluid leadership,” says SEI's Chairman and CEO Al West. “People figure out what they're good at, and that shapes what their roles are. There's not just one leader.

The Task: What Work Needs to Be Done?

What practices and structures need to be put into place to achieve highly functioning teams? To a great extent, this is determined by the nature of the work that groups are doing. For example, some teams make products, some teams provide services, other teams make decisions, and still others provide advice and consultation. The nature of the work sets constraints on design. However, there is much variation in team design, even among companies doing very similar types of work—and sometimes even large variation among teams within the same company.

The People: Who Is Ideally Suited to Do the Work?

What manager has not wrestled with the question of who to put on the team? As illogical as it may sound, many managers form their team without too much thought and subsequently, attempt to figure out how to capitalize upon and match up people's skills. A much better approach is to carefully think about the task in terms of the work to be done, and then choose people on the basis of their skills relevant to that work. For example, think back to the three basic purposes of teamwork described earlier: Tactical, problem-solving, and creative. Obviously, creative types are not as well suited for tactical teams as are highly organized, results-driven people, and vice versa.

 

Relationships: How Do Team Members Socialize Each Other?

Someone could get the idea from reading this chapter that teams are built from scratch and that, once built, the manager's work is largely done. This assertion, of course, is false. Teams are not built from scratch; instead, a member or two is added to a team that is changing its direction; members leave teams for natural (and other) reasons. In short, members of teams are continuously entering and exiting; as a consequence, the team itself is constantly forming and reconfiguring itself. Group socialization is the process of how individuals enter into and then (at some point) leave teams. The process is disruptive, to be sure, yet it need not be traumatic or ill-advised.

When people begin to work together as a team, they immediately begin a process of socialization, such that members of the team mutually shape each other's behavior. More often, teams may undergo changes in membership, such that some members may leave and new ones may enter. The process of socialization is essential for the ability of team members to work together and coordinate their efforts.

Conclusions

We have focused on some of the important dimensions of creating and managing teams in a direct fashion. Much planning needs to precede the construction of teams and, once constructed, teams need fairly continuous maintenance. To the extent that the teams are manager-led, this work is the purview of the leader or manager; the more self-directing the team becomes, the more the team will do this for itself. When the team is built—in terms of the task, the people, and their relationships—the leader's work does not stop. During this time, the leader needs to also assess the physical, material, economic, and staffing resources necessary for performing the work to be done. The focus of the leader should not be to presume that everything is fine, but rather to coach the team to work through the issues of task, people, and relationships systematically.